Tarzana Crime Rate Trends — Los Angeles
Tarzana is a southern San Fernando Valley neighborhood organized around Ventura Boulevard, named for Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzana ranch. Predominantly single-family ranch homes south of Ventura on the Santa Monica Mountains foothills.
Four categories moved in Tarzana this August, one fresh spike and three sustained structural shifts. The dominant story is a split across property crime: burglary has been falling for months while other larceny has been rising, and both are now far enough from their prior-year levels to register as multi-month structural changes, not monthly noise. Motor vehicle theft is running 20.9% above the prior 12 months, part of the same upward tilt in property crime sub-categories.
Other larceny is the sharpest signal this month, with 392 incidents over the trailing 12 months against 293 the year before, a 33.8% increase year over year. Burglary moved in the opposite direction, down 48.0% year over year, 106 incidents against 204. Vandalism and robbery also declined, robbery by 32.3% and vandalism by 25.8%, pulling the overall mix into a pattern where violent crime and burglary are falling while theft categories are climbing.
Notable signals 1
Other Larceny
The past 12 months saw 392 incidents — about 107% above the 189 average from prior years.
All categories, last 24 months
Each panel: recent monthly count vs. trailing 12-month context. MoM is the most recent month vs. the one before; 12mo YoY compares the trailing year to the year before that.
What's been quietly true for a year
Spikes get attention. Sustained shifts shape policy. These are multi-quarter patterns where the past 12-month total differs meaningfully from the year before — they often precede the baseline resetting.
- Burglary has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 106, down 48% from 204 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
- Other Larceny is climbing.
The trailing 12-month count is 392, up 34% from 293 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline up.
- Vandalism has reset to a lower baseline.
The trailing 12-month count is 219, down 26% from 295 the year before. If the trend holds another quarter, it will pull the multi-year baseline down.
What next month likely looks like
Forecasts trained through August 2026, with a likely range we're 95% confident the actual count will fall inside. Categories with too little recent volume — or violent categories at the neighborhood level — show no forecast and are surfaced through signals above instead. See the methodology page for the gating rules.
Aggravated Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Arson
Below the volume threshold for a reliable forecast — too few incidents in recent months to project from.
Burglary
Homicide
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Motor Vehicle Theft
Other Larceny
Robbery
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Sexual Assault
Too low-volume per neighborhood for a reliable point forecast — see the rare-event and streak-break signals above instead.
Theft from Vehicle
Vandalism
How Tarzana compares
Peer neighborhoods picked by closest 12-month other larceny volume — a pragmatic v1 of peer matching. Demographic / housing-stock peer matching isn't built yet (we deliberately don't ingest income or race data alongside crime). Volume similarity has the right intuition: “neighborhoods experiencing comparable other larceny levels.”
Encino
380 incidents over the past 12 months — 12 below Tarzana's 392.
Open page →Sun Valley
407 incidents over the past 12 months — 15 above Tarzana's 392.
Open page →Boyle Heights
428 incidents over the past 12 months — 36 above Tarzana's 392.
Open page →Do crime spikes here spill over to adjacent neighborhoods?
Tarzanadoesn't have enough spike history in any single category for a stable spillover rate yet (we want at least 5 events). The table below lists what we have.
| Category | Spike events | Same-category spillover |
|---|---|---|
| Other larceny | 2 | — too few |
Each row shows Tarzana's historical spike events for that category, and how often any of its 5 adjacent neighborhoods spiked the same category within the next 3 months. A high same-category rate suggests a shock that travels (e.g. theft crews moving across Los Angeles); a low rate means spikes here tend to be local to the neighborhood. Categories with fewer than 5 historical spike events are listed but their rates are suppressed.
Recurring local terms (last 12 months)
Top terms in incident descriptions for Tarzana, excluding generic crime taxonomy. Useful as texture — what kinds of specifics show up here that don't show up elsewhere.
Hour-of-day, day-of-week, and seasonality
Distribution of bucketed incidents in this neighborhood across the full analysis window. Useful for routine context — shopping-strip thefts vs. late-night assaults read very differently when you can see when each typically happens.
How we built this page
Counts from March 2024 onwardrun roughly 10 to 20 percent below LAPD's command-staff totals citywide. LAPD's legacy crime feed froze after a late-2024 cyber incident, and the replacement NIBRS feed has been shipping fewer rows than LAPD's own statistics show. The shortfall is most visible in homicide and in dense south-LA neighborhoods, because the new feed lacks coordinates and resolves location through reporting districts. Trend direction is still meaningful; absolute levels are not directly comparable to LAPD's headline figures.
Data → Anomalies → Forecast → Page
Incident data is pulled from LAPD's open feed on the LA City Open Data portal — the NIBRS-coded feed from 2024-03 onward with UCR backfill to 2020. Mapped to 10 NIBRS-aligned categories and aggregated to neighborhood × category × month.Anomalies are surfaced using strict thresholds (~p < 0.01). Forecasts are Prophet with low-count gating; violent categories at the neighborhood level skip the forecast and show rare-event / streak signals instead.
Spike rule: 12-mo total > baseline mean + 2.5σ AND ≥ 20 incidents AND 6-mo confirms. Drop rule: 12-mo total < baseline mean − 2.5σ AND baseline mean ≥ 20. Rare event: any incident in the last 90 days, no prior comparable in ≥ 5 years.